urxvt (rxvt-unicode) is a terminal emulator with Unicode support. I recently switched from uxterm to urxvt because uxterm didn't properly parse key combinations including the Alt key and didn't always display non-Latin characters. Neither are particularly major annoyances.
While looking through the man page to find how to turn off the scroll bar, I learned about urxvtd: a daemon that opens multiple terminal windows in the same process. The advantage for doing so is faster creation time and reduced memory usage. I found that neither amounted to much in my case - the startup time improvement is barely noticeable and for the ten or so terminal windows I may have going, the memory savings appear negligible. It's still a nifty idea, and in any event the Alt key combinations work properly and characters I don't understand display as they should.
To use urxvtd, put the following in your ~/.xinitrc or ~/.xsession to start
the daemon on login and exit on logout:
urxvtd -q -f -o
Then run the client with urxvtc. That was quick.
I'm using the following X resource definitions to make it look pretty:
URxvt.background: AntiqueWhite
URxvt.foreground: black
URxvt.scrollBar: off
URxvt.font: xft:DejaVu Sans Mono-12